Betrayed

There was nothing on the telly last night (I can’t get used to the luxury of Sky at the Other Half’s house and stick to the main four channels out of habit) so I made him watch a programme about celebrity fitness videos. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m a vapid, slack-jawed moron and will sit through anything with “celebrity” in the title. It was a light-hearted (for "light-hearted" read "crap, unfunny"), deconstruction of the genre, aiming to sift the wheat from the chaff in terms of actual effectiveness. First up was Cher’s "A New Attitude" video from 1992. At this point, a horrific, hitherto repressed memory surfaced. You see, I bought that video and the requisite exercise step in 1992. I was nineteen, and my dress size was only one number behind my age. I fell upon Cher’s promise to make me thin like a fat girl on a free buffet, and coveted visions of the slender, lithe creature I would doubtless become. For about two weeks I wheezed, sweated and lumbered around my living room in a hopeless attempt to keep up. The exercises were absolute torture, but I thought this was because I was extremely lardy and unfit. Eventually, it became clear that if I were to complete the whole thing I would need a crash team standing by with oxygen and chocolate hobnobs, so I quit. A failure. Pathetic. The shame of not even being able to do a home fitness video haunted me until I joined a step class a couple of years later and lost about four stone.

Except it transpires that even six-stone plastic surgeon junkie Cher couldn’t do the bloody exercises. The video was filmed in three-minute segments so that Madam could stop for a breather before being powdered, watered and having her wig tightened for another go.

Thanks then Cher. Thanks for making all us fat girls feel even worse than we already did as we lurched helplessly from lunge to grapevine before getting our fat feet tangled up in the laces on our hi-top pink reeboks and crawling off to the biscuit tin in a weeping, red-faced fit of despair. Thanks for dangling the unattainable in front of us, doing your weird smug alien smile and generating waves of carefree happiness even as we fell over the pouffe for the third time in twenty minutes and nursed another stitch. I hope the g-string you wore in the Turn Back Time video chafed your crack and gave you thrush. Witch.

Carry on.